The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill

and Customs of Interpretation Menaka

Philips
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-liberalism-trap-john-stuart-mill-and-customs-of-int
erpretation-menaka-philips/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-subjection-of-women-john-
stuart-mill/

The Prophet Of Modern Constitutional Liberalism: John

Stuart Mill And The Supreme Court 1st Edition Edition
John Lawrence Hill

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-prophet-of-modern-
constitutional-liberalism-john-stuart-mill-and-the-supreme-
court-1st-edition-edition-john-lawrence-hill/

John Stuart Mill - Sobre o Progresso e a Educação 1st

Edition John Stuart Mill

https://ebookmass.com/product/john-stuart-mill-sobre-o-progresso-
e-a-educacao-1st-edition-john-stuart-mill/

On John Stuart Mill Philip Kitcher

https://ebookmass.com/product/on-john-stuart-mill-philip-kitcher/
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive John
Stuart Mill

https://ebookmass.com/product/a-system-of-logic-ratiocinative-
and-inductive-john-stuart-mill/

Logic and Society: The Political Thought of John Stuart

Mill, 1827–1848 Yuichiro Kawana (Auth.)

https://ebookmass.com/product/logic-and-society-the-political-
thought-of-john-stuart-mill-1827-1848-yuichiro-kawana-auth/

■■■■■■■ - [■] ■■·■■■■·■■■John Stuart Mill■ [■]

■■·■■■■·■■■John Stuart Mill■ [[■] ■■·■■■■·■■■John
Stuart Mill■]

https://ebookmass.com/product/%e5%a5%b3%e6%80%a7%e7%9a%84%e5%b1%8
8%e4%bb%8e%e5%9c%b0%e4%bd%8d-%e8%8b%b1-
%e7%ba%a6%e7%bf%b0%c2%b7%e6%96%af%e5%9b%be%e5%b0%94%e7%89%b
7%e7%a9%86%e5%8b%92%ef%bc%88john-stuart-mill%ef%bc%89/

O desenvolvimento do eu : ética, política e justiça em

John Stuart Mill Dalaqua

https://ebookmass.com/product/o-desenvolvimento-do-eu-etica-
politica-e-justica-em-john-stuart-mill-dalaqua/

The Holiday Trap Roan Parrish

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-holiday-trap-roan-parrish-2/
The Liberalism Trap
 The Liberalism Trap
John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation
MENAKA PHILIPS
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Philips, Menaka, author.
Title: The liberalism trap : John Stuart Mill and customs of interpretation / Menaka Philips.
Description: 1st edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023006188 (print) | LCCN 2023006189 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197658550 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197658574 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197658581
Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—Philosophy. | Democracy. | Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873.
Classification: LCC JC585 .P443 2023 (print) | LCC JC585 (ebook) |
DDC 320.5101—dc23/eng/20230228
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006188
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006189
ISBN 978–0–19–765855–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197658550.001.0001
For Nora
 Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Is Liberalism Inescapable?
2. Disciplined by Liberalism: Contestations, Pedagogies, and the Ex
emplary Mr. Mill
3. Mill Reconsidered: From a Crisis of Certainty to a Politics of Unce
rtainty
4. The School of Virtues: Emancipating Women, Wives, and Mother
s
5. Earning Democracy: Class Politics and the Public Trust
6. Governing Dependencies: Between Authority and Self-Determina
tion
7. Politics, Possibility, and Risk: Beyond the Liberalism Trap

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Preface

The problem this book explores can be illustrated by an affair

featuring the Russian president. In the summer of 2019, Vladimir
Putin announced that liberalism was dead. Interviewed by the
Financial Times ahead of the G20 summit in Japan, Putin punted on
Russia’s interference with US elections and turned instead to the
failures of liberalism, an idea that had become, in his words,
“obsolete.” Using fundamental disagreements over LGBTQ rights,
multicultural politics, and migrant protections as examples of
liberalism’s decline, Putin argued that its defenders were tone deaf
to the demands of the “overwhelming majority.” The liberal idea, he
concluded, had “outlived its purpose.”1
Putin’s pronouncement quickly captured the news cycle. Asked
about the interview, then-President Donald Trump seemed ready to
agree with the Russian autocrat, though he also mistook the latter’s
use of the term “liberal” to refer to California Democrats.2 Most
others correctly understood Putin to be attacking a tradition of
western political thought originating in the nineteenth century.3 A
few noted that Putin’s critical assessment had become fashionable
“among reactionaries” in several countries, bolstering the rise of far-
right figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini, and Marie Le Pen. In
that reactionary fashion, for instance, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán
claimed that alternative visions of the world are taking hold, visions
that “are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe
not even democracies, and yet are making nations successful.”4
Those who were loath to side with Putin but reluctant to praise
liberalism argued that while the liberal idea is not yet obsolete, it is
“on the ropes” and its systems clearly “under pressure.”5
 European Council President Donald Tusk was more forthright in
his criticism of Putin’s assertions. At the G20, Tusk told his audience:
“We are here as Europeans also to firmly and univocally defend and
promote liberal democracy. What I find really obsolete are—
authoritarianism, personality cults, the rule of oligarchs.”6 The
Financial Times itself published not one but two separate rebukes of
Putin’s comments, suggesting he was posturing on the world stage
to downplay liberalism’s successes, particularly in terms of economic
development.7
By no means were reactions limited to politicians and reporters.
Putin’s claims about the fate of the liberal idea became part of a
series of scholarly responses to Raymond Geuss’s critique of the
liberal tradition in his curious commemorative of Jurgen Habermas’s
ninetieth birthday. For Seyla Benhabib, Putin’s and Geuss’s
overlapping pronouncements against liberalism warned of “strange
bedfellows,” while for Martin Jay it suggested a “guilt by association”
which “may not be a fair tactic—although in this case, it is hard to
resist.”8 The exchange made clear the extent to which public and
scholarly debates can merge around the question of liberalism and
its value. As a “vexed object of attachment,” the idea has as firm a
footing in academic circles as it has in public debate.9
Putin’s interview clearly sparked a broad conversation about the
vitality and utility of the liberal idea. But one must wonder why it
worked so well as to capture the attention of news media, pundits,
scholars, and political officials alike. After all, Putin’s comments were
in many ways quite mundane. This is not the first time that
liberalism has been declared dead by its critics or revived by its
defenders. A little over a century after its birth, Herbert Hoover
announced that “liberalism was under attack “even in the great
countries of its origins.”10 And though Francis Fukuyama declared its
universal triumph in 1989, thirty years later he made headlines again
for observing that the “liberal world order” had begun to falter and,
perhaps, to reverse.11 Because challenges to liberalism have
emerged sharply in places like the United States and Europe—
exemplars of the liberal tradition—they are especially damaging to
“the reputation of that system as a whole.”12 In the intervening
years, Fukuyama argues, the uneven distribution of globalization’s
gains and particularly the rise of identity politics have ruptured any
liberal consensus, deepened social resentments, and made feasible
the popularity of politicians like Putin, who have capitalized on these
challenges in their appeals to the people liberalism forgot.13 For
detractors, Fukuyama’s concerns about liberalism’s future reinforce
their criticisms of the celebratory bell he rang in 1989. After all, we
are reminded, “what counts as victory in the field of ideas, theory or
ideology will always be contested.”14
Still, many have tried to “keep the ship afloat,” with book after
book released “trying to breathe new life into liberalism” in the face
of these challenges.15 The Economist even chose to mark its 175th
anniversary by devoting a series of issues to liberalism’s rise, decline,
and prospects for resurrection in the twenty-first century. Presidents,
legacy media, news blogs, pundits, and scholars all carry on debates
over whether the “comfy Western consensus” over liberalism is
under threat.16 At the very least, all this talk of its relative health
indicates that the liberal idea is well and widely attended to.
For precisely that reason, liberalism remains a reliable and
convenient flashpoint for political conversation. In fact, Putin’s
Financial Times interview later makes clear that the real object of his
ire was a specific set of rights-based claims and democratic
practices, which have been undercut by his regime and for which
Russia has received sustained criticism. However, by couching policy
questions on LGBTQ rights or minority protections in the language of
liberalism, Putin effectively reframed the ensuing debate away from
issues of democratic legitimacy and his regime’s own conduct and
toward an assessment of the liberal idea itself. His critics fell in line.
Taking various defensive positions, they outlined either what
liberalism has achieved or more cautiously, what liberalism can
achieve but has not yet. Others accepted its demise.
Thus, following his interview, coverage of the G20 summit as well
as related conversations between scholars narrowed in on the fate of
the liberal idea as much, if not more, than on Russian policies.17 By
directing his interview toward a discussion of liberalism, Putin
worked a sleight of hand—centering our focus on the life of an idea
while quietly shifting his regime’s policies into the background.
And therein lies the liberalism trap.
My primary claim in this book is as follows: we are, in both public
discourse and in studies of political thought, too preoccupied with
the idea of liberalism. Focus on liberalism has become habitual and
in so becoming, burdens interpretive practices among scholars as
well as political debates in society at large. As the Putin affair
illustrates, liberalism can become a discursive ploy, redirecting
political conversations about specific practices and policies toward
debates about the life and times of the liberal idea. Attentiveness to
the idea is narrowing our range of inquiry. My claim, importantly, is
not a statement about bad readings or biases. The problem of the
liberalism trap runs much deeper. Liberalism is used to outline a set
of theoretical and evaluative practices that organize how we think.
We tend to approach political questions, histories, and texts in terms
of their presumed relation to liberalism, and we understand the
significance or utility of these things in terms of what they might tell
us (or not) about liberalism.
This is an issue of interpretive method. Liberalism has become a
discursive anchor that weighs down how we approach politics. Our
attachment to this idea does not simply bias critical inquiry and
deliberation. That attachment restricts the conditions under which
such work is possible. The book offers an argument about how a
familiar idea can transform into a methodological trap for political
thinking.
The book makes three critical interventions. The first concerns
interpretive habits: how can reliance on liberalism, as a
methodological frame for inquiry, bind contemporary politics, from
the media coverage surrounding a G20 summit to the erudite
discussions that have marked political scholarship for nearly a
century? I concentrate my study in the following chapters on the
field of political theory. In its attentiveness to ideas and their
implications, the field is poised to query how, and with what effects,
conceptual attachments can shape our political perspectives. Yet, as
I argue, approaches and debates within the field have become
subject to the conceptual dominance of liberalism as an interpretive
frame. This tension, between critical practice and interpretive habits,
affords striking insight into the challenges posed by the liberalism
trap.
Second, it outlines how the interpretive habits involving liberalism
impact scholarly work through a study of the liberal tradition’s now
preeminent figurehead: John Stuart Mill. Popularly seen as
liberalism’s “founding father,” Mill offers critical resources for
identifying the effects of the liberalism trap and, as the book advises,
for escaping it. Reading Mill through his status as a liberal icon has
displaced the fundamental appreciation for uncertainty that informs
his politics. Instead of a liberal ideologue, I identify Mill as a
cautionary radical, a progressive thinker caught up in the challenges
and the opportunities of doing politics without the conceit of
certainties. The uncertain attitude Mill embraces is at once a
condition of possibility and of risk. Recovering that condition not only
reinvigorates our understanding of Mill but also informs how we
approach our own political contexts and challenges.
The book’s third critical intervention involves the politics of canon
construction and “canonization” itself. Over the past few years,
increased attention has rightly been paid to the exclusionary effects
of canon construction—particularly as concerns representations of
gender, race, and non-western contributions to political thought. I
add to this work by drawing attention to the politics of inclusion into
the canon. We ought to concern ourselves with the ways in which
canonical recruitment can contain a thinker or a text’s receptions
and in turn limit how they are read into contemporary political
thought. In Mill’s case, for instance, I suggest that contemporary
discussions around gender equity and postcoloniality might engage a
Millian interest in uncertainty. That interest disrupts reliance on
ideological anchors like liberalism, enabling a wider, even if more
complex, range of possibilities for political analysis and collaboration.
These interventions attend to the varied effects of reading
through liberalism in studies of politics—from the way we approach
questions of political import, to the way we take up texts and
authors to address those questions. In all, the book initiates a
discussion about the dangers of the liberalism trap, and in so doing,
invites consideration of what we might discover beyond it.
 Acknowledgments

This book is a product of the teachers I’ve been blessed to know,

and who have come through my life in many forms. By the light of
their minds, as J.S. Mill would say, I have learned so much and am
learning still.
I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I’ve had without the
sacrifices my parents have made. They left everything they knew
and loved in Sri Lanka when the war broke out and pursued a much
different life than they had likely imagined. My mother, Amali, is a
cultural anthropologist. She brought me along on her early field work
in India, embarking on an academic career with a stubborn six-year-
old and later managing a multigenerational household mostly on her
own—I now look back with amazement at her strength and stamina.
She remains my foremost mentor in feminist theory and practice. My
father, Rajan, masks his real vocation as a political commentator
with a daytime career in urban planning. Peppering story time with
his own distillations of Marx and Engels, and biographies of US civil
rights leaders, he set the tone of my interests and became my first
editor and critic. I still write with my parents in mind. Needless to
say, my early plans to become a virologist by day and a singer by
night stood no chance against the examples they offered, of a life
spent with ideas. I am obliged to them for that.
It seems unfair that I could have exceptional role models at home
only to encounter more out in the world, but I did. In Canada, John
Shaw, Brent Pavey, and John Barnes made lessons on religion,
politics, and English a delight and encouraged my first experiments
with writing. I am fortunate too to have had Barbara Arneil, Bruce
Baum, and Mark Warren as professors during my time at the
University of British Columbia. At Northwestern, Daniel Galvin, James
Druckman, and Sara Monoson led wonderful seminars that invited
fun and creative applications of political theory. Lars Tønder, and
Elizabeth Beaumont (then at the University of Minnesota) were
especially generous with their time; early discussions with Lars and
Liz were essential to developing what would (eventually) become
this book. But it was Laura Janara’s contagious love of political
theory that first sparked my own. Her invitation to discuss a future in
the field changed everything. It was also Laura who suggested I
work with the exceptional Mary Dietz—and that remains the best
advice I have ever followed.
Mary brings political theory to life. Her phenomenal lectures,
precise and insightful readings, and ability to guide without leading
are the gold standard of academic research and teaching. From
Mary, we learned to follow the text—and the questions, challenges,
and confusions it generates—into the analysis. My fascination with
J.S. Mill, and the idea for this book, first germinated in her classes.
Serendipitously, my introduction to Mill in Mary’s class coincided with
James Farr’s fantastic seminar in American Political Thought. Jim
stumped me with an incisive comment on a paper concerning the US
political tradition. “I get the contestation part of the argument,” he
responded, but suggested that I interrogate my own assumptions
about “the ‘liberalism’ within which it all allegedly unleashes itself.”
Clearly, that comment had legs. It is a great privilege to have
worked with Mary and Jim and to now call them friends.
These formative teachers are joined by the amazing colleagues I
learned from in graduate school. In Laura Montanaro, Andrew
Clarke, and Clark Banack, I found brilliant, lifelong friends—and
delightful people to travel with. Bai Linh Hoang, Giovanni Mantilla,
and Michael Julius kept classes lively and life fun in Minneapolis, and
I am thankful to know Libby Sharrow—an inspiring scholar, and
fellow X-Filer. The truth is still out there.
At Northwestern, Nick Dorzweiler, Alison Rane, Samara Klar,
Kharunnisa Mohamedali, Emily Alvarez, Joshua Robison, Rachel
Moskowitz, Christoph Nguyen, Ari Shaw, and Thomas Leeper
became family. They made five years in Chicago wonderfully rich and
all too short. I also benefitted from Ross Carroll’s and Doug
Thompson’s excellent leadership of the Political Theory Workshop,
where I first put some of the ideas in this book up for consideration.
There was no better place to do so, as Ross and Doug created a
space in which intellectual exchange, collegiality, and lasting
friendships rounded out our training in political theory. Nick and
Alison, Désirée Weber, Chris Sardo, Lexi Neame, Anna Terweil, Boris
Litvin, Lucy Cane, and Arda Gucler helped nurture that space, and I
am thankful for having been part of their community.
And then of course there’s Jennifer Forestal. My compatriot, my
co-author, my WhatsApp sister—who has read and commented on
too many drafts of this project. One never knows what life after
graduate school will entail, especially after being immersed in a
program where political theory was well and widely respected. What
started as a lifeline in those early days of being freshly minted
theorists in unfamiliar departments across the country has
transformed into one of the most supportive and productive
friendships of my life. Working with Jeni is a collaborative dream—
from simultaneously co-editing paragraphs online (it works!) to
dividing and conquering the appetizer and drink lines at conferences.
Reader, if you can find your own Jeni, you’ll be better for it.
The arguments about Mill and about liberalism I make in this
book were given at various conferences over the years. I am
appreciative of the perceptive comments and questions that came
from audiences, panelists, and discussants at APSA, WPSA, CPSA,
and especially APT and BIAPT—which include those from Daniel
O’Neill, David Williams, Jeanne Morefield, Eric MacGilvray, Michael
Goodhart, Alasia Nuti, and Terrell Carver, as well as Inder Marwah,
whose wonderful work has enriched how I read and understand Mill.
Thanks also to Anne Manuel for facilitating visits to the John Stuart
Mill Library housed at Somerville College, Oxford, and for invitations
to participate in the events she has organized for the archive.
I could not have asked for a better editor than Angela Chnapko
who, along with Alexcee Bechthold steered the project smoothly
through the various stages of academic publishing. Sincere thanks
also to Brid Nowlan for copyediting and to Derek Gottlieb for
indexing. And it was a special delight to work with my talented
friend Kara McGuire (Also Known As), and her colleague Katie
Frederick, who conceptualized and designed the book’s cover.
I found my first professional home at Tulane University thanks in
large part to Tom Langston and Nancy Maveety who brought me on
board. I learned much from colleagues at Tulane, who read draft
chapters and advised me through my first years in the profession.
This is especially true of the PoliChix (Chris Fettweis’s moniker, which
we hate to love, but do)—Mirya Holman, Christina Kiel, Celeste Lay,
Casey Love, Anna Mahoney, Virginia Oliveros, and Izabela Steflja.
What a wonderful group of scholars to learn from—and a better
happy hour crowd cannot be found.
I also found a true a family of friends in Mary Grace, Patrick,
Meredith, Kelly, Brandon, William, Madeleine, Kara, Seamus, Trey,
Nikki, Paul, and Krysia. Even in the thick of writing, pandemics,
parenting, and hurricanes, they make life a joy with Friendsgivings,
pizza challenges, beach getaways, and so many costumed
escapades. It doesn’t matter where we are, Core Group is forever.
And because (as Jeni would say) space matters, I must acknowledge
the place where I discovered this family: New Orleans. A city of
haunting contrasts, great revelry, and deep magic. In the immortal
words of Anne Rice, “as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was
home.”
My move to the United States for graduate school began with a
brief year in Minneapolis. As a fresh-faced student in a new country,
I had plenty of reason to be anxious, and I would have been had it
not been for Nance and Brian Longley. They made me welcome,
offered great conversation, delicious meals, and time with their
family. But I owe them a special debt of gratitude for their daughter
Nora—an incomparably beautiful soul. Nora and I were chance
roommates in Vancouver, and years later, fortune would bring me to
her home city for graduate school. I am grateful for that extra time
with her. Before she left, Nora told me she was proud of me, and
that is an honor I hope one day to earn. This book is dedicated to
her.
My own (very) large family of accomplished aunts, uncles, and
cousins spread around the world has been a steady anchor in the
sometimes-nomadic life academia can involve. There are few things
I look forward to more than our chaotic reunions, the 1,000 daily
group messages, and Zoom chats between 10 generations, across 5
time zones. And by far the most loved Auntie there is, my sister Mira
is one of the best and brightest people I know. Along with my
mother, she was there for me at a particularly difficult time; the
project would not have crossed the finish line without her. To my
dragons Jai and Rami—whom I carried in one form or another while
writing this book—my thanks for the daily reminders to laugh, dance,
and play.
Now to Geoff Dancy. He managed breakfasts and bedtimes
whenever Mill demanded my attention and lent his considerable
editing skills to this manuscript (more than once). I met Geoff on an
elevator in Minneapolis, where he hatched a five-year plan. As with
most things he sets out to achieve, he executed that plan with
aplomb. Far past the five-year mark, through four cities, with two
great kids, dearest Bellatrix, silly Elvira, and so much more to come
—the Philips Dancy Krewe can parade with the best of them. In
Geoff, I have found a sharp mind that can spar and inspire, a friend
always ready to support and to encourage, and a partner with whom
I have built a life that feels like an adventure. There is no greater
gift than that.
 1
Is Liberalism Inescapable?

As soon as you label a concept, you change how people perceive it.
Adam Alter, The New Yorker

To be trapped by an idea is to be beholden to it, to become so

deeply entangled that our perceptions are bound to it.
Understanding that entanglement and its effects in the context of
liberalism constitutes the central aim of this book. What I call the
liberalism trap is not a problem of the idea itself, but of our collective
infatuation with it.
Preoccupations with liberalism—a fixation on working out its
meaning(s), origin(s), and future(s)—are becoming methodologically
customary, and with troublesome consequences for the study and
practice of politics. In the scholarly context, liberal preoccupations
generate interpretive habits which detail not only why, but how
scholars of politics must center analyses and debates around
questions and presumptions about liberalism.1 And in the broader
public sphere, concerns about the death and/or resurrection of
liberalism have been the lifeblood of political discourse for over a
century.2 From academia to political punditry, no idea in modern
history has enjoyed as much study and use, and from all angles, as
has the liberal idea.
Notably, when the term “liberal” appeared around the fourteenth
century, it referred to noble and generous spirits, characteristics
befitting free men and gentlemen. Research using Google Ngram
data suggests that the word gained a more political meaning in the
late 1700s, as use of terms like “liberal policy” or “liberal principles”
began to gain traction.3 The Liberales group of Spain was among the
first to adopt the term as a political identifier in 1812, during its fight
for universal male suffrage, a constitutional monarchy, and land
reform.4 By 1815 “liberalism” had made its first appearances in the
context of Western European party politics, associated with themes
of free inquiry, self-government, and a market economy, though “it
remained an obscure and marginal category.”5
Over the past two centuries, those simple beginnings have given
way to a conceptual powerhouse, imbued with an almost human-like
agency through pronouncements about liberalism’s birth, its health,
its responsibilities, and its failures. And that agency is widely felt.
Thomas Nagel observes that virtually every political argument in the
western world is a variation on the theme of liberalism.6 But ongoing
interrogations of liberalism’s imperial past and its transnational grip
today indicate that this is by no means a strictly “western”
phenomenon.7
The breadth of arguments about it also reveals liberalism’s
conceptual elasticity. The term’s evolution, Harold Laski noted, has
incorporated “winds of doctrine so diverse in their origin as to make
clarity difficult, and precision perhaps unattainable.”8 For John
Dewey “liberalism has meant in practice things so different as to be
opposed to one another,” something Judith Shklar warned might
result in the term becoming too “amorphous” to be of much use.9
Evidence of this elasticity can be found in everyday political
conversations. On matters of public policy, for instance, liberalism
has been used to both justify and challenge regulations concerning
what women wear, while proposals for universal healthcare in the
United States have been viewed as a battle for and against
liberalism’s survival.10 For some pundits on the right it is a political
ideology devoted to big government and interventionist social
agendas. Meanwhile, critics on the left see it is a platform for free
market and elite interests that impedes the efficacy of democracy
and the achievement of social justice. And despite disputes over
who, or what, is or is not a “liberal,”11 the subject of liberalism’s life
and prospects throws together “socialists, conservatives, social
democrats, republicans, greens, feminists, and anarchists” in
sometimes unexpected ways.12 Debates about liberalism have made
for uneasy bedfellows over the years—a point some have toyed with
for narrative effect.13
Liberalism’s conceptual elasticity offers a clue to understanding its
popularity as an object of constant praise and censure; there is
always room for renegotiating its meaning and value. The life of this
idea has been nourished by continuous discussion of its past effects,
its present significance, or its future possibilities. Though both its
critics and defenders tend to evaluate the success of liberalism as a
measure of the political consensus it achieves, in reality, victory in
the realm of ideas should also be judged by sheer persistence. The
endurance of this idea relies less on collective agreement over its
value and more on a collective need to attend to it in political
analysis. Even for some of its most ardent critics, liberalism
maintains a hold they cannot seem to shake. As Wendy Brown says
of left politics, an attachment to the liberal idea reflects “an
organization of desire we wish were otherwise.”14
But the wishing otherwise Brown desires maintains an active
connection to the idea, and keeps it, in a word, alive. Brown’s lament
thus captures something of the nature of liberalism’s victory in
political discourse—it is not one of consensus but of inescapability.
Whether we love it, hate it, or remain endlessly ambivalent about it,
the liberal idea is defended, critiqued, and assessed across the
political spectrum. The question of liberalism’s power, then, is not
about universal appeal (or emerging decline) but about its discursive
resilience. On that score, liberalism’s dominance in the realm of
ideas is unparalleled. And this is precisely why declarations of its
death, along with attendant efforts to keep it alive, might be almost
comical if not for the very real effects our deep attachments to
liberalism are producing: from conflicts over policy to conversations
between academics, those attachments are directing the way we
think about and do politics.
 A Tumultuous Affair: Political Theory and
Liberalism
The effects of preoccupations with liberalism are best on view in the
so called “ivory tower” of academic political theory. If even a field
oriented around the interrogation of ideas and practices can become
caught in the liberalism trap, it would offer substantive evidence of
the trap’s hold. But the problem in this sphere is that liberalism’s
conceptual triumph can prop up a particular mode of inquiry, which
imposes limits on how scholars address perennial questions and
contemporary problems. Pressing political concerns—from structural
inequality to democratic malaise—are presented as subjects of
liberalism’s rise, decline, evolution, and so on. Escaping the
liberalism trap is thus a disciplinary problem with political
ramifications.
Imagine that the very efficacy of political science is seen as
tethered to “the consequences of liberalism’s fate in the polity at
large.”15 Disciplinary historians have argued that professional political
science is and always has been a “species of liberalism” that
responded to demands for revising or reconsidering the “liberal
visions” at its foundation.16 Disagreements over liberalism are
understood to have reoriented the intellectual identity and
relationships among the subfields of political science as a whole.
Scholars document, for instance, how the “varieties of liberalism”
that organized the US discipline became targets of censure for
European émigrés like Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno,
and Max Horkheimer.17 Having experienced political upheavals
across the Atlantic, these thinkers took a largely critical view of
liberalism’s intellectual purchase in US political science.18
Yet even these challenges to liberal visions of the discipline have
helped to perpetuate scholarly preoccupations with the idea. The
process of perpetuation-through-critique marks one of the most
influential confrontations with liberalism’s role in US intellectual and
political life, from scholar Louis Hartz. Published in 1955, Hartz’s The
Liberal Tradition in America contributed to the disquiet of the
postwar era. In his view, liberalism had so fully captured the US
mind that neither its citizens nor its intellectual leaders were
equipped to rethink US political identity, nor its response to a rapidly
changing global context. These liberal foundations made for a future
in which past would be prologue.
The Liberal Tradition has haunted studies of US political thought
and development since it appeared. Generations of scholars after
Hartz have worked either to prove or debunk his central thesis about
the United States’ liberal origins, arguing for the elasticity of liberal
ideas and their openness to contestation, or for competing
ideologies which have prevented the kind of liberal indoctrination
Hartz described.19 His intervention effectively organized a scholarly
tradition of investigating liberalism in studies of US political thought.
In ways they may not have expected, then, the legacy of the
postwar émigrés and critics like Hartz has been to sustain the
conceptual power of the very idea they aimed to disrupt.20
As in the public sphere, liberalism’s dominance in political
scholarship is an achievement of twentieth-century contestations.
Consequently, John Gunnell observes,

the literature of political theory is, and since the late 1930s has been,
saturated with discussions about liberalism and its tradition—rise and decline
—faith—dangers, limits, collapse, challenges, agony, paradox, irony, spirit,
development, end, poverty and crisis and its relation to innumerable things,
individuals and other political concepts.21

For Duncan Bell, liberalism has simply become the metacategory of

contemporary political discourse.22 Without question, attention to
this metacategory has been incredibly generative. Evaluations of
liberalism have underwritten arguments over the role of the state in
the provision of social goods, the relation between the individual,
family, and community, policies concerning colonial and postcolonial
contexts, and minority claims to representation and justice.23 These
debates have fruitfully proposed ways of thinking differently about
liberalism in relation to social and redistributive justice, the nature of
personhood, the challenges facing modern multicultural societies,
and international relations.
But the broader interpretive effects of disciplinary preoccupations
with the idea ought to give scholars pause. In attending to liberalism
across various sites of analysis, we can transform the idea from a
subject of study into a condition for study. The metacategorical
effect of our investments in this idea is thus a methodological
practice which puts liberalism first, so to speak. Now, preoccupations
with liberalism can mark the boundaries of our interpretive work.
And we can become trapped by them. Working within these
interpretive boundaries can limit how we approach particular
debates and problems, setting up divisive labeling practices in place
of real conversations and ideological disagreements in place of
political negotiations.

A Caveat on Scope
An objection to this argument worth addressing at the outset
involves the scope of the problem concerning liberalism. Readers
might take my intervention against the liberalism trap to constitute
an intervention against liberalism writ large. The distinction between
these points is critical and goes to the heart of my departure from
existing studies of liberal thought: I am not making a case for
abandoning ideological frames per se (if such a thing is even
possible). My intervention does not, therefore, dismiss the
conceptual utility of liberalism in toto or its historical significance to
the development of political thought. For these reasons too, I do not
engage in already well-tilled debates over what liberalism is, does, or
fails to be. This is not a book that tries to “pin down” liberalism and
its notoriously elastic definitional history, nor is it interested in
disparaging liberalism or saving it from attack.
What this argument does attempt is to unsettle the custom of
examining politics through these questions. The problem I identify
has little to do with the liberal idea and everything to do with how
and why we deploy this idea in political discourse. By and large,
liberalism’s conceptual triumph has begun to infiltrate the practice of
political theorizing rather than remaining subject to that practice. Put
another way: scholars are not just thinking about liberalism;
liberalism, or more particularly preoccupations with it, are shaping
the way we think about politics. An examination of our reliance on
this idea is therefore imperative. And nowhere is that reliance on
better display than in the reception of liberalism’s quintessential
representative: John Stuart Mill.

J.S. Mill, The Iconic Liberal

No doubt J.S. Mill will appear to be a counterintuitive choice for this
project. Most students are introduced to his thought through its
association with liberalism. They first encounter On Liberty as one of
liberalism’s essential texts. Beyond the classroom, too, Mill’s name is
referenced almost daily across dozens of articles concerning
liberalism from issues of education to debates about pornography.24
So why pursue an assessment of our investments in liberalism
through one of the idea’s most iconic representatives? The argument
that our relationship to liberalism has come to constitute an
interpretive trap might be more apparent with figures like Hobbes or
Locke, thinkers who predate liberalism’s political emergence. Here,
at least, the charge of anachronism could be applied and would
clearly outline the interpretive latitude we take in making liberalism
central to analyses of thinkers or texts. As Chapter 2 notes, there is
certainly room for investigating the role liberalism plays in receptions
of these canonical figures and others like them. Laying the
groundwork for such inquires, however, is most effectively done in
relation to Mill. My concern is not simply that we are applying the
“wrong labels” to the “wrong thinkers.” It is not about correct
labeling practices, but about the politics of labeling. The application
of ideological labels to a text or thinker has interpretive and political
consequences for how we perceive them going forward. It is,
therefore, Mill’s paradigmatic status that can best illustrate the
methodological effects of political theory’s affair with liberalism. The
thinker we are most comfortable with reading under the liberal label
can illustrate the consequences of centering liberalism in general.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Mill’s ideological status, and what it
has cost us in terms of our engagement with his thought, while Cha
pters 4, 5, and 6 illustrate how his tenure as “the liberal” negatively
impacts the way we treat his work on questions of gender, class, and
empire. As an iconic liberal, Mill exemplifies the interpretive
problems that arise out of our relationship with liberalism. After all,
reliance on settled opinion, On Liberty tells us, can undermine critical
thought. And because Mill’s association with liberalism is so often
relied upon, little consideration is given to how that association has
directed the way scholars understand and appropriate his political
writings.
Mill is hence a critical test of the book’s central premise. That our
attachments to liberalism might limit engagement even with one of
its paradigmatic figures would indicate that something has gone
awry. It is my contention that Mill’s exemplary status within the
liberal canon can lead us to read his theories as if they speak to
ideological certainties and to style particular elements of his texts to
fit whatever version of liberalism is under review. Trapped within the
confines of this idea, readers substitute Mill’s now canonical status
as a liberal figurehead for his political arguments. The thinker is
being drowned out by the very tradition he is supposed to captain.
Considered by many to be the father of modern liberalism, Mill is
ideally placed to illustrate how our preoccupations with the idea
shape the practice of political theorizing.25 Drawing inspiration from
Mill’s concerns with habituated learning, we ought to ask whether
our focus on liberalism has itself become habitual, and to what
extent it closes us off to alternative resources for, or approaches to,
political theorizing.
As I argue, emphasizing Mill’s exemplarity as a liberal has
obscured a key element of his political thought: the uncertainty he
employed as a political thinker and actor. Untethered from his now
customary identification with liberalism, Mill’s political writings on
human nature, individuality, and social progress give evidence of a
cautionary radical, a thinker driven not by ideological certainties but
by the challenges and the possibilities of doing politics without any
guarantees of success. I develop this reading by re-centering Mill’s
oft-overlooked Autobiography. A text avidly read and commentated
on by Mill scholars working in the tradition of intellectual biography,
Mill’s self-reflective study is rarely drawn into contemporary
appropriations of his more famed political discussions concerning
individuality, harm, or the conditions for individual and social
development.26
The separation of Mill’s self-assessments from his political writings
is a mistake. The Autobiography is an essential primer to Mill’s
thought, an argument I make in Chapter 3. Written and revised over
seventeen years, the text details Mill’s evolution as a public
intellectual with a mind “always pressing forward, equally ready to
learn and unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of
others.”27 It is a text which shows Mill turning many of his
observations about political life—the dangers of customary
knowledge, the connections between individuality and community,
and the challenges of social progress—upon himself as he examines
the effects of his education, his relationship with his father, James
Mill, and his pivotal mental crisis. Mill’s experiences lead him to
appreciate the role of uncertainty in political life, and his own politics
are very much instructed by that appreciation.

A Caveat on Mill
My profile of Mill might rankle some readers who will protest the
focus on his relation to liberalism. Why not consider his identification
with utilitarianism, democracy, or socialism? After all, Mill explicitly
wrote on these ideas, and scholars have attended to those writings.2
8
In response, I would argue that the liberal identifier has claimed a
greater hold on Mill’s legacy, and I would not be alone in noting this.
Though Mill scholars have examined his engagements with other
traditions of thought, his almost parental relationship to liberalism is
rarely questioned. Even as he warns us away from labeling Mill too
narrowly, historian Richard Reeves lists liberalism as being decidedly
ahead of Mill’s democratic or socialist identifications.29 That narrative
is reinforced by the way we are introduced to Mill in the first place.
In their volume on Mill’s political thought, Nadia Urbinati and Alex
Zakaras point out that the first thing a student learns about Mill is
that he is the exemplary liberal philosopher.30 This description will
hardly surprise anyone familiar with introductory political theory
textbooks; it reflects an opinion shared across generations of readers
of Mill’s thought.31 To say that the association of Mill with liberalism
is a customary practice in the modern world is thus not an argument
for how he should be read, but a statement about how he is read.

Cannon Fodder
That Mill himself was a critical observer of the dilemmas of
customary knowledge and is now subjected to the practice of being
read as a canonical liberal is both ironic and illustrative of what can
happen when our political imaginations are held captive by an idea
like liberalism. As subsequent chapters argue, Mill’s iconic status has
suppressed the importance of his self-reflections and thus missed
the role uncertainty plays in his political thought. In drawing these
omissions out, the argument made here also taps into contemporary
debates about canon construction and deconstruction.
Discussions about the politics of canons are increasingly
widespread, not only in political thought but across different
academic disciplines. Driving those discussions are concerns with
how canons can be both productive and exclusionary at the same
time.32 On one hand, canons serve useful organizing purposes
because they “set up paradigms to govern work in their disciplines”;
on the other, those governing paradigms will necessarily privilege
and exclude.33
For these reasons, political theory and its tradition of great texts
has garnered criticism in the twentieth century from scholars who
point to what that tradition has left out and actively rendered
invisible.34 As Penny Weiss argues:

remote and academic as they sometimes appear, debates about what to

include in the canon ultimately touch almost everyone: students handed texts
from lists of “great books” to guide them, for example; members of groups
whose history and literature is more or less available or widely known; and
citizens whose governments justify their actions with ideas from political texts
deemed classic.35

Canons and canonizing processes are evidently political. Feminist

scholars note that the history of political thought as it has been
constructed within academic political theory consistently
marginalizes the varied contributions of women to the development
of political thought and practice.36 Race and ethnicity constitute sites
of exclusion as well—even as work produced by scholars of color has
been appropriated by the field at large.37 From a global perspective
too, critics argue that efforts to take up non-western works still
employ western canonical themes and authors as evaluative
standards, while studies in comparative political thought can reify,
rather than disrupt, east/west dichotomies and the divisions they
sustain.38
Notably, such concerns are not aimed at removing traditionally
dubbed canonical thinkers from political theory rubrics, but at
adapting our reliance on them to reflect “an awareness of their
social and historical limitations and an appreciation for other kinds of
work.”39 Challenges to canon construction recognize that “political
theory is about human and not merely Western dilemmas”40 nor, we
can add, merely male or white subjects. Interrogating the canon is
vital to ensuring reflective rigor in how the field defines itself and for
brokering new ways to read and do political theory, not only outside
the traditional canon but also alongside and in contestation with it.
My argument is a companion to these examinations of canons
and their exclusionary politics. But I reorient the critique of canon
construction to consider how canonization itself can pose challenges
for scholarship. Alongside canonical omissions, we need to consider
how being contained within (even restricted to) canons can shape
texts and authors, as well as the ways we draw upon them to
organize and resolve our own political challenges. The re-readings of
Mill presented in Chapters 4 through 6 in fact suggest that canonical
inclusion can direct the reasons we turn to particular texts and
authors, as well as the conversations we draw them into. This is the
problem I identify with receptions of Mill’s work on gender, class, and
empire. A thinker whose intellectual legacy has been captured by the
liberal label, Mill’s writings have become cannon fodder for debates
about how and where liberalism interacts with these issues.
Together with the pedagogical utilities of canons, a point
discussed in Chapter 2, scholars ought to be attentive to the
methodological effects of canonical identification. Those
identifications, as in the case of J.S. Mill, can restrict from the outset
the parameters within which texts and authors are read and applied.
To confront the liberalism trap is, in part, an intervention against the
limits imposed by disciplinary canonization.

Plan of the Book

From interpretive habits and their textual effects to the politics of
canon construction, the scholarly convention of making liberalism a
necessary frame for contemporary inquiry is apparent. The book
takes several steps in its assessment of this tumultuous affair with
the most dominant idea of the modern age. The first step is
identification; the second, refusal; the third, recovery; and the
fourth, discovery.
Chapter 2 offers a close examination of the evolution of
liberalism’s conceptual dominance in political theory and of its
disciplinary effects in the field. As I suggest, scholarly preoccupation
with the idea has shaped not only the parameters of our debates
and contestations, but more broadly, it is conditioning the field’s
pedagogical practices and organization. That conditioning influences
the ways in which students of political thought are introduced to
canonical “liberal” thinkers and ideas. Turning to scholarly receptions
of J.S. Mill, I identify how our pedagogical practices involving
liberalism have modified those thinkers and ideas in troubling ways.
Once “canonized” by liberalism, figures like Mill become fixed
resources to which contemporary narratives about liberalism can
easily turn.
Having identified the dangers of entrapment, the next step is to
confront those dangers by refusing liberalism’s interpretive claim on
textual analysis. Chapter 3 offers an account of Mill’s politics
untethered from his liberal status. Focusing on Mill’s intellectual
development, which took a sharp turn following his experience with
depression, I examine his move from a “manufactured” mind under
the tutelage of his father and Jeremy Bentham to his intellectual
revolt and turn to uncertainty. Uncertainty channels the intellectual
flexibility and caution fostered by Mill’s embrace of “eclecticism,”
“half-truths,” “many-sidedness,” and “fallibility,” terms he employs in
the Autobiography to describe his changing intellectual orientation. I
catalogue these changes in terms of “uncertainty” to provide a
structured way of tracing Mill’s self-described shifts away from
dogmatism, and the growing discomfort he develops in his early
twenties with determinative ideological platforms. As I argue, Mill’s
appreciation for uncertainty not only generated the distance he
needed to reassess his early education under Bentham and his
father, James Mill, it also angled him toward a more capacious
approach to political thought and action.
Pursuing these shifts in Mill’s development enables recovery of
the political strategies Mill’s uncertainty sustains in relation to
questions of social reform, strategies which have been occluded by
reading him through liberalism. From radical critiques to gradualist
and paternalist precautions, Mill’s uncertainty not only shaped his
intellectual orientation but also underwrote his political proposals
regarding gender, class, and empire. Recovery of those strategies
and their effects are taken up in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
Chapter 4 attends to the limitations of treating Mill’s gender
politics as a cipher for liberal feminism. Looking at prominent
feminist receptions of Mill’s gender politics, I argue that much of the
literature assesses his politics with a prior investment in assessing
liberal feminism. Against this practice, I highlight the complexities of
Mill’s feminist politics, apart from concerns with defining the
ideological label he is so often read under. The chapter shows that
uncertainty generates a particular set of political anxieties for Mill,
revolving around a desire to expand (rather than contract) the
possibilities for “man as a progressive being”; but it also prohibits
Mill from taking a determinative approach toward obtaining such
possibilities.41 Thus, though Mill offers a radical critique of gender
inequality in the nineteenth century, calling for the political
enfranchisement of women and their emancipation from the confines
of the household, he simultaneously enacts cautionary caveats, even
reversals. On issues of divorce and women’s employment for
instance, Mill’s fears about the unintended consequences of women’s
social and political liberation take root. In effect, despite Mill’s
support for gender equality, his approach to reform is inflected by
uncertainties about the direction and consequences of making broad
structural changes to achieve it.
Recovery of Mill’s uncertainty and its political consequences can
and should be traced comparatively. As Chapter 5 outlines, Mill’s
strategies for political reform concerning gender interact with his
discussions of class inequality and representation in England. His
cautions regarding women’s emancipation are in fact exacerbated by
his class politics, such that his defense of women’s emancipation is
mediated by the economic classes to which they belong. Mill’s
support for removing sex and class-based distinctions for suffrage
took account of how changes to the electoral body would draw in
new and diverse political interests and groups. His response to those
challenges again reflects his uncertain mode of political theorizing.
The radical, gradualist, and paternalist strategies he employs in
relation to women’s emancipation gain traction and become further
institutionalized in his policies regarding class and representative
politics. From excluding the poor to advocating plural voting for
enlightened citizens, Mill’s insightful critiques of class inequality are
attended by efforts to slow, if not forestall, the effects of universal
suffrage and its impact on parliamentary representation.
 Building upon these applications of Mill’s uncertainty, Chapter 6
draws the comparative assessment of Mill’s political interventions
into his writings on empire. Contrary to the now dominant refrain
citing Mill as an unwavering “liberal imperialist,”42 I argue that we do
in fact find the same radical critiques and gradual and paternalist
reforms in Mill’s view of the British Empire. Yet, as with his feminist
and class politics, Mill’s imperial writings are often read through his
liberal status. For scholars interested in the imperial roots of liberal
political thought, Mill’s iconic position within that tradition makes him
the model for studies of liberal imperialism.
Importantly too, readings of Mill on liberal empire have tended to
keep his writings on empire at a distance from his domestic
considerations, such that his “radicalism” at home is contrasted with
his “imperialism” abroad. But following Mill’s uncertain mode of
politics enables a clearer comparative view of his writings across
these issues. Even as Mill defends the imperial project and refutes
the right of self-determination for colonized subjects, he is never
wholly comfortable with the realities of colonial rule, a discomfort
that has been almost entirely obscured in the now standard reading
of Mill in the context of liberal empire. That discomfort leads him to
make some striking critiques of the British Empire and its colonial
administrators, on issues of violence, education, and the demands of
justice for colonial subjects. That he could both defend and doubt
empire is an effect not of ideological certainty but of political
uncertainty.
The book concludes by outlining the new terrain we might
discover for engaging with the full scope and nuance of Mill’s
arguments regarding women’s emancipation, class reform, and
British imperial practice. Beyond the convenient labels of liberal
radical, liberal elitist, liberal imperialist, etc., which are differentially
applied to him, what Mill’s politics reveal is a complex and interactive
set of strategies that recognize the necessity of political critique and
reform, while remaining wary of their uncertain possibilities.
Understanding the generative tensions of Mill’s uncertain mode of
theorizing can be an informative resource for contemporary political
thought.
To illustrate this point, I focus my discussion in Chapter 7 on
three areas: contemporary feminist studies of gender in
transnational perspective, studies of empire and imperialism today,
and the challenges of a critical interpretive practice. Scholarly
preoccupation with liberalism in these areas bears the same
methodological and political risks that attend treatments of Mill as a
liberal exemplar: namely, a narrowing of our interpretive horizons
and by extension, of the political possibilities we envision. Moving
beyond those preoccupations uncovers alternative avenues for cross-
cultural collaboration on issues of gender equity, as well as for a
more expansive and comparative analysis of empire and the legacies
of imperialism in the modern age. My concluding remarks reimagine
contemporary interpretive practices through Millian uncertainty, and
beyond the trap of liberalism.
With Mill as its guide, the book highlights how liberalism gets
deployed to decode historical texts and contemporary questions.
From pedagogical practices to scholarly debates, there is a
discernible proclivity for assessing political developments and
arguments according to the various aspects of liberal thought that
scholars presume must be critiqued (or defended). Thinkers, texts,
social and political problems are thus forced into “nominalist
cubbyholes,”43 molded to suit the conceptual boundaries of a field
disciplined by liberalism. The perpetual danger facing interpretation,
Quentin Skinner notes, is that established frames of reference might
prepare the scholar to perceive or react to their subject of study in
particular ways.44 To defend against that danger, political thinking
must involve an effort to ensure that our preconceptions do not
determine how we encounter a text or problem, nor exhaust the
dialogue surrounding them.
The problem is that we have become complacent about how
easily we impose liberal identifiers on political texts and issues and
are thus losing an important degree of critical perspective in studies
of political thought. We are in effect transforming what might be a
particular lens into a general structure of inquiry, allowing our
attachments to liberalism to fix in advance the terms of political
theorizing and the politics it makes imaginable.
My hope is that bringing these issues to light will not only shift
how we approach Mill’s work but also encourage critical reflection
about the authoritative role our attachment to liberalism occupies in
political inquiry today. What follows is thus a preliminary step toward
confronting the dangers of the liberalism trap—to exchange
established understandings for the invigorating challenges of
uncertainty.
 2
Disciplined by Liberalism
Contestations, Pedagogies, and the Exempla
ry Mr. Mill

It is not to be denied that Mr. Mill had many followers who were more
inclined to close the mouths of their opponents with the mention of his
great name than to face the logical consequences of their own views. But
this happens to all leaders. Nothing was further from Mr. Mill’s own habit
than to rest upon mere authority.
Mill’s Obituary, The New York Times

Debates about liberalism are, arguably, one of the few areas in

which the discursive habits of public and scholarly spaces intersect.1
Disputes over the liberal idea among G20 members, political pundits,
and legacy media are ever present in the scholarly world of political
science. Liberalism’s sustained dominance in studies of political
thought, however, is particularly striking given the diversity of
contestations over the idea’s meaning and roots. While defending or
demeaning the liberal idea has marked much discussion in the public
sphere, debates within the academy have also been mired in
disagreements over what liberalism is.
Even while scholars generally recognize a liberal family of values
—a commitment to the rule of law, individual rights, free press, and
religious tolerance, among others—“no one settled concept
liberalism or liberal” has prevailed.2 Instead, liberalism is “marked by
disjuncture, competing and often-incompatible values, and a breadth
of social, political and moral ideals—some in tension, others in
outright contradiction.”3 The family of values attached to liberalism
“can be defined, related, and integrated in several different ways.”4
In effect, the hallmark features of liberalism are essentially
contested. Between its disjunctures and its variations, liberalism
emerges in scholarship as a “squabbling family of philosophical
doctrines, a popular creed, a resonant moral idea, the creature of a
party machine, a comprehensive economic system, a form of life . . .
all of these and more.”5 For scholars to attempt an authoritative
definition of the liberal idea might thus be “impossible and probably
counterproductive.”6
However, these definitional disagreements explain why our
preoccupations with liberalism in the academy have been
phenomenally productive. Liberalism’s elasticity affords scholars of
political thought space to interpret and deploy the idea in wide-
ranging ways. And that range generates a set of interpretive
possibilities—and problems—which have substantively shaped the
field. Concerns with liberalism have infiltrated political theory’s
contestations within the academy, the field’s interpretive practices,
and its organization of canonical texts and authors. Those concerns
have also shuttered alternative interests and approaches to texts or
issues that get caught within liberalism’s orbit. We have become
disciplined by our attachment to liberalism and are now prey to the
disciplinary repercussions of that attachment.
This chapter identifies three aspects of liberalism’s authoritative
position in contemporary political thought: (1) the discipline’s
organizing entanglements with liberalism; (2) the expansion of those
entanglements through interpretive and pedagogical practices; and
(3) the effects of both on a model case: receptions of John Stuart
Mill.
Considering first how the identity of the discipline has become
entangled with liberalism, I discuss the merger between liberalism
and the development of the discipline in the west documented by
historians of political science. But while the close connections
between the discipline and doctrine are recognized, little attention
has been given to the impact of their merger on the actual practice
of political theorizing. The chapter thus turns to those impacts by
following how attentiveness to liberalism has expanded in the field of
political theory. I look specifically at Duncan Bell’s helpful analysis of
liberal “conscription” and “retrojection,” processes which work to
widen liberalism’s conceptual reach.7 Those processes indicate how
texts and thinkers are variously drafted into an ever-growing liberal
canon. But the real challenge, I argue, lies beyond who and what
gets labeled as liberal; rather what scholars have to watch for is how
that label modifies the thinkers or themes under study. And indeed,
the label’s modifying powers are visible in the field’s pedagogical
practices. Introducing students to particular ways of reading texts
and authors as members of liberalism’s squabbling family inevitably
helps to nurture the idea’s interpretive grip.
The chapter’s third move is to examine the effects of these
processes of entanglement and expansion in the case of John Stuart
Mill. Looking at the evolution of Mill’s reception in the twentieth
century, I note that his iconic status has been especially important in
an era where liberalism became its own category of analysis. Mill, in
this context, has become a standard bearer of a tradition under
constant scholarly review. And once canonized as such, figures like
Mill become fixed resources to which reviews of liberalism can turn.
Even as focus has shifted to different aspects of Mill’s political
writings, what those writings say about liberalism has remained a
permanent feature of how and why scholars take up his works.
Notably too, evolving receptions of Mill show how his status as a
liberal icon has allowed for interpretations which are, at once,
limiting and curiously diverse. Limiting because wherever liberalism
is under review, Mill is called in as a representative case; diverse
because the “liberalisms” he is tasked with representing are
sometimes so different as to be incompatible. The danger across
these instances is that Mill’s politics are lost to our preoccupations
with liberalism.
I close the chapter with two important notes about the
conceptual shift this argument is pushing for. First, there are
alternative approaches to the “liberal icon” reading of J.S. Mill, which
attend to his political career and to his own observations about his
ideological bearings. These alternatives show us not only what his
liberal canonization risks, but just as importantly, what we might
recover from Mill by suspending focus on his liberal status. The
second concluding note of the chapter posits that such alternatives
help chart different directions for the practice of political theorizing.
By tracing the methodological effects of the liberalism trap, and
reconstructing Mill’s thought beyond its tethers, this and later
chapters argue that new textual insights and political opportunities
await discovery.

Entanglements: Liberalism’s Disciplinary

Evolution
Dating the birth of academic political science is not without
challenges. Erkki Berndston points out that while professorships on
the theme of politics were established in Europe as early as 1622,
scholarly appointments to the study of politics appeared only in the
1840s.8 As late as 1949, only four countries had formal political
science associations, and while many nations had scholars who
researched in the area of politics, “the United States alone had an
established institutionalized political science profession.”9 That fact
led some to characterize the discipline as US in origin.10 But the US
roots of political science have since been complicated, if not
altogether refuted. As Dorothy Ross notes, the origins of US political
science actually reflects a “multinational conversation that
contributed German, French, and British political ideas to America’s
own blend.”11
The discipline’s multinational evolution was the subject of a series
of studies commissioned by the International Political Science
Association in 1988. Looking for connections and variations in the
development of political science across nations, some studies took a
comparative historical approach following new methods of inquiry
and their shifting popularity across different national contexts.12
Others worked “forensically” to trace critical “arguments and
debates.”13 Robert Adcock’s history of the discipline pursues a more
genealogical account of political science that focuses on shared
ideas. Arguing that European scholars directly influenced the field’s
emergence in the United States, Adcock observes that those
international influences have clearly placed liberalism at the core of
US political science.14
The influence of European transplants like Francis Lieber (the first
formally titled political scientist in the United States), as well as
conversations between “specifically liberal writers,” resulted in the
emergence of a discipline organized by “varieties of liberalism.”15
While noting critical philosophical differences between the writers he
nets under the label (from men like J.S. Mill and Alexis de
Tocqueville to William Graham Sumner and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt), Adcock finds that transatlantic contributions to a liberal
tradition of thought shaped the broadly “liberal visions” of political
science in the west.16 In this telling, professional political science
was and is a “species of liberalism,” a characterization largely shared
by disciplinary historians.17 But so too was its development linked to
perceptions of liberalism in the public sphere. As David Ricci
suggests, political science in the postwar period “strongly supported
the existing institutions and practices of liberalism.”18 In the US
context, Raymond Seidelman observes that the efficacy of the
discipline was thought to be bound to “the consequences of
liberalism’s fate in the polity at large.”19 Discipline and doctrine
appear intertwined on multiple levels, with investments in liberalism
written into the founding concerns of political science in the west.
But this history was not a smooth one. Rather, liberalism’s merger
with academic political science in the twentieth century was timed in
an era of crisis: the authoritarian fevers that swept Europe following
the Great War, persistent racial and ethnic tensions, and attendant
conditions of social and economic inequalities seemed to fly in the
face of what scholars and civilians alike considered to be the “liberal
promise” of liberty, equality, and self-government. In view of these
tensions, the leaders of an academic field already engaged in studies
of liberal thought wondered whether liberalism was to be rescued as
a universal doctrine or relegated to an artifact of history.20

The New Political Science

Worry about liberalism’s future stimulated serious debate over its
role in both the practice and study of politics in the postwar period,
a debate sharpened by the “behavioral revolution” of the mid-
twentieth century. Commonly understood as a shift toward positivist
methodologies, the behavioral revolution is widely seen as a critical
moment in the evolution of the discipline in the United States and,
some argue, across the Atlantic as well.21 Notable too is the central
role liberalism occupied in discussions of the movement’s aims and
effects. James Farr suggests that the behavioralist’s call to focus on
more scientific methodologies were made alongside a “political
message about liberal pluralism.”22 And those political scientists who
adhered to the movement’s “proclamations about behavior, science,
and liberal pluralism were also those who were (or were to become)
the most influential authors of scholarly texts and the highest office
holders in the professional associations.”23 For John Gunnell, the
behavioral turn “was less a revolution” than it was “a recommitment
to the visions of both the scientific study of politics and liberal
democracy that had informed the discipline for nearly a half century;
it was also, in part, a response to the first significant challenge to
those visions.”24 Indeed, the professional successes Farr notes
developed alongside criticism from scholars who questioned the
quantification of political science research and also, quite vocally,
from those who questioned the movement’s liberal conceits in view
of behavioralist claims to be value-neutral. The convergence of these
criticisms was significant for the development of academic political
theory.25 A conflict over growing “antiscientific and antiliberal
sentiment in political theory”26 targeted the apparent “consensus on
the values of liberalism” animating political science.27
Varied critical reactions came from those trained in the US
academy, like Louis Hartz and Theodore Lowi, as well as from a
generation of postwar European émigrés who rejected the cozy
symbiosis they saw between liberalism and the discipline. Leo
Strauss famously chastised the “new political science” for failing to
recognize that the war and its effects had revealed why liberalism
needed challenge: “This almost willful blindness to the crisis of
liberal democracy is part of that crisis.”28 Strauss lamented that the
discipline merely “fiddles while Rome burns,” and yet “it does not
know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”29
But scholars may have been more attuned to the crisis than
Strauss implies. The tensions disciplinary historians identify with the
behavioral turn generated internal strife within US political science
for years to come.30 And messages about liberalism were ever
present. In 1967, for instance, the Caucus for a New Political Science
formed to return the discipline to a “study of politics relevant to the
struggle for a better world.”31 Among their members were political
theorists intent on drawing the “critique of U.S. liberal democracy
into the disciplinary center.”32 That critique and responses to it
continue to inform professional reflections about the discipline’s
identity and aims—with efforts to complicate narratives about the
“uniformly liberal”33 character of US political theory, or to frame
political science itself as a “product of liberal modernism.”34
All told, the discipline has been, and in fact remains, acutely
attentive to the liberal idea. From its transatlantic influences onward,
the varied negotiations over liberalism which disciplinary historians
attach to the development of political science in the west, and in the
United States particularly, have imprinted the field of political
thought. That imprint has important methodological implications. As
debates about liberalism expand, so to do the resources drawn in to
fuel them. I argue next that preoccupations with liberalism have not
just evolved with the practice of political theorizing. They have
restructured that practice to grant more and more conceptual space
to liberalism when it comes to defining who and what we study, as
well as the terms upon which we do so.
 Expansions: Liberal Conscriptions and Liberal
Pedagogies
With our disciplinary entanglements in play, it is no wonder that
liberalism is a dominant subject of contemporary political
scholarship. For political theory in the wake of the behavioral turn,
questions about liberalism have been viewed as central to its
revitalization within the academy. John Rawls’s seminal Theory of
Justice, for instance, is credited with sparking a new era of political
thought in the wake of behavioralism, prompting a wide-ranging
discussion about the substance and parameters of justice in modern
societies.35 Theory and subsequent scholarship took up that
question in relation to narratives of liberalism. If sympathetic readers
aimed to refine Theory to strengthen liberalism’s premises, critical
readers saw in the text proof positive of liberalism’s weaknesses.36
In that sense, the book’s intervention offered a revival and
recentering of liberalism for contemporary political theory.37
Rawls’s Theory and its receptions are just one example of how
the liberal idea has held as the center of scholarly focus. As
Seidelman suggested, the politics of the discipline are still tied into
the study of liberalism in the polity, and the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries bear witness to an expansion of
preoccupations with liberalism and its merits, its meanings, and its
prospects in feminist and postcolonial interventions, histories of
empire, multicultural politics, postmodern hesitations, and much
more.38
In his informative piece “What is Liberalism?” Duncan Bell
observes:

Today there is little that stands outside the discursive embrace of liberalism in
mainstream Anglo-American political debate (and perhaps especially in
academic political theory), and most who identify themselves as socialists,
conservatives, social democrats, republicans, greens, feminists, and anarchists
have been ideologically incorporated, whether they like it or not.39
Regardless of one’s stance on liberalism’s merits, in other words,
working within liberalism’s embrace is a condition of contemporary
political scholarship. As Bell continues, the challenges involved in
defining liberalism have led to a practice of using risky shortcuts,
definitional fiats, reductive portrayals of canonical figures, and
arbitrary timelines to outline the parameters of our positions vis-à-vis
liberalism. To minimize those risks, he argues for greater precision in
explaining how and why certain thinkers or ideas have been moved
under the liberal umbrella. Taking the case of John Locke’s relatively
recent ascension into the liberal canon, Bell points out that Locke
was not regarded as an ideological ally of liberals until nearly a
century after liberalism’s political founding. Indeed, Locke worked
well before the term, much less the tradition, had come into being.
Today, however, Locke is understood to be comfortably located in
the liberal canon by many contemporary thinkers.
What mechanisms were involved in bringing Locke into the folds
of a tradition that emerged well after his time? Bell shows that Locke
“became a liberal during the twentieth century. As part of a process
of retrojection, Locke’s body of work—or at least some stylized
arguments stripped from it—was posthumously conscripted to an
expansive new conception of the liberal tradition.”40 And thanks to
that conscription, in the “shorthand history of political thought”
Locke’s name now reads as “the grandfather of liberalism.”41

Conscripting the Canon

We should work carefully through this process of conscripting
authors to the liberal canon. What implications run through the
assertion that stylized arguments can be stripped from a work and
enlisted in service of an ever-expanding liberal tradition? Retrojection
expands liberalism by retroactively claiming thinkers and issues into
ongoing scholarly debates about the liberal tradition. It does not
constitute a problem so long as we understand that liberalism
amounts not to one thing in perpetuity, but to “the sum of the
arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognized as
such by other self-proclaimed liberals” over time.42 This again points
to the immense productivity of liberalism’s definitional elasticity: the
disjunctures and variations that attend scholarly contestations over
liberalism’s meaning create room to recruit Locke’s body of work, or
stylized versions of it, into liberalism’s ever-expanding camp.
Retrojection provides a compelling measure of how and why the
liberal label now governs so much of the discourse of contemporary
political theory. As questions about liberalism emerge, expand, and
transform—so too will the persons and places we turn to in order to
address those questions. For instance, Jennifer Pitts notes that while
liberalism might be applied strictly to theories developed after its
political origins in the nineteenth century, it has been “more broadly
but conventionally” applied “to the languages of subjective rights
and self-government stemming back to the early-modern period.”43
With liberalism’s elasticity widely recognized, the charge of
anachronism in such cases can be sidestepped with a few well-
placed clarifications about the themes or general values the liberal
canon might reach back to claim. Careful scholars will acknowledge
their participation in liberal retrojections when appropriating thinkers
and ages who fall outside (sometimes far outside) the temporal
parameters of liberalism’s emergence.
Together with the definitional challenges surrounding the liberal
idea, retrojection accurately describes the phenomenal conceptual
reach the idea now has on the past and present of political thought.
Not only Locke, but also Burke or Hobbes may fall under its sway;
and not only seventeenth or eighteenth century thinkers, but even
the Ancients might be brought into discussions of liberalism.44
Conscription into the liberal canon requires only that elements of the
past pertain, in some way, to the sum of the arguments we identify
with liberalism now. Theoretically, one might suggest that the idea’s
canonical boundaries are boundless.
For Don Herzog, we ought to consider what such umbrella
categories are tasked with doing: are “they bearing too much
weight? or being asked simultaneously to perform contradictory
tasks? Or silently shifting their meanings?”45 And to those questions
we should add: what happens to the ideas, texts, and thinkers that
are marshaled as evidence of those meanings at work? Greater
attention needs to be paid not only to how study of liberalism has
grown—but also to how its morphing over time informs interpretive
work. How, particularly, does the process of liberal expansion change
the way we learn to read and identify these texts or thinkers once
the label has been put in place?

Pedagogical Foundations: Establishing Liberalism

Answers to that question can be found in the way theory is taught.
Looking specifically at how liberalism and its presumed architects are
presented in general politics textbooks and instructional surveys of
the liberal tradition offers a useful snapshot of how scholarly
practices expand liberalism’s metacategorical power over the field.
In their introductory textbook to ideologies, Terence Ball and
Richard Dagger suggest to students that liberal ideas “are so much a
part of our lives and our thinking that they seem natural. But that is
because these liberal ideas are so much a part of our heritage
throughout Western civilization in general.”46 Ball and Dagger here
remind students that liberalism is a constructed political category,
which only appears natural because we have become accustomed to
its presence in our discourse. Nevertheless, the authors point out,
once established as familiar, ideologies like liberalism function to
“provide people with some sense of identity and orientation—of who
they are and where and how they fit into the great scheme of
things.”47 Put another way, liberalism’s “history carries a crucial
heritage of civilized thinking, of political practice, and of
philosophical-ethical creativity.”48 Ideological perspectives map out
our conceptual world, organizing our engagements with it—and
liberalism is the map for our contemporary experience.
Despite, or perhaps because of, liberalism’s resistance to
definitional consensus– narratives about its heritage and place within
political thought inevitably turn to a “family of values,” and the
thinkers or texts related to them, to give students some sense of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Too jolly well!” declared Mr. Dobb.
“’E wouldn’t buy my carumgorum studs off of me, though,”
mentioned Mr. Clark, as though this were a circumstance that
disproved Mr. Pincott’s business inefficiency. “Three chances I give
’im, too, to say nothing of leaving ’em at ’is shop for four days for ’im
to make up ’is mind. ’E was out when I left ’em.”
“Oh, ’e ain’t a fool, not by no means!” observed Mr. Dobb. “Well, and
now do you know Mr. Simon Lister?”
“I know hof ’im,” volunteered Mr. Clark. “’E’s that old chap what lives
in the big new ’ouse along the London road, what used to be
something in the hoil and colour line.”
“That’s the chap,” accepted Mr. Dobb. “’E come into a fortune,
unexpected, about a year ago. ’E’s one of my regular customers.”
“What! you don’t mean to say a rich old chap like that drops around
with old iron and odd crockery to sell to you?” cried Mr. Tridge, in
surprise.
“Oh, no!” corrected Mr. Dobb, a trifle loftily. “’E belongs to the hart
section of my business. He buys off of me; ’e don’t sell. ’E buys
china and vallyble hornyments and so forth. A collector, ’e is, only
the better kind. What they calls a connosher. ’E only goes in for
good stuff.”
“And ’e buys it off of you?” asked Mr. Tridge, incredulous.
Momentarily Mr. Dobb’s eye drooped.
“’E don’t know so very much about hart,” he observed. “’E goes very
largely by what I tells ’im.”
“And what do you know about hart?” asked Mr. Lock, gaping.
“If I can do business by making out I knows things,” said Mr. Dobb,
firmly, “I knows ’em! See? Anyway, I make out I do. And ’e’s got the
money to spare to get a collection together, and ’e comes to me to
’elp ’im, and I ain’t the man to refuse ’elp to anyone with money.
Pounds and pounds ’e’s spent with me, just on my recommendation.
I let ’im think that I think ’e knows nearly as much as I do about hart,
and ’e thinks, therefore, as I wouldn’t think of cheating ’im.”
“There seems a lot of thinking about it,” said Mr. Lock.
“It’s a hobby of mine,” returned Mr. Dobb, “thinking is.”
“And you wouldn’t dream of deceiving ’im, I’ll lay!” said Mr. Tridge,
ironically. “No more would I sell a chap off the ‘Raven’ a solid, rolled-
gold himitation ring for a quid if I ’ad ’alf a chance!”
“China and brickybacks ’e’s bought off of me, and a few rare old
prints, and some genuine hoil-paintings,” catalogued Mr. Dobb. “And
some odds and ends what ’e calls bigjewrious and virtue. ’E’s got
the money to spend, and ’e wants to spend it, and ’oo am I to stand
in the way of a man’s wishes?”
“It’s better than a lottery,” said Mr. Clark, wistfully. “And ’ave you got
’im all to yourself, ’Orace?”
“Up to a few days ago,” replied Mr. Dobb. “And that brings me to the
matter in ’and. Old George Pincott got to ’ear about this ’ere Mr.
Lister, and ’e’s trying ’ard to get ’is ’ooks in ’im and drag ’im clean
away from me. After all, I found ’im first, and so I told Pincott, but ’is
only answer was that all was fair in love and war.”
Mr. Dobb paused and sighed at such commercial laxity. Mr. Tridge
feelingly remarked that he did not know how the principle acted in
war, but that sometimes it made things very awkward so far as love
was concerned. He was about to cite an instance when Mr. Dobb
again claimed attention.
“Ever been in that poky little sweetstuff shop ’alf way down Market
Lane?” he asked, as a general question. “Oh, well, I ain’t surprised!”
he continued, as heads were shaken negatively. “It’s a tumble-
down, ramshackle little place. But there’s a big hoil-painting ’anging
up against the end wall, because that’s the only place where they
can find room for it.”
“What sort of a picture?” asked Mr. Lock, with interest. “Saucy?”
“No, it’s supposed to be a bit of scenery—scenery in a fog at twilight,
by the look of it. It’s signed by a chap called Carrotti, and the old gal
what keeps the shop will tell you that it’s been in ’er family for
’undreds of years. She won’t sell it, she says, because it’s a
heirloom in the family.”
“Sentimental old geezer,” commented Mr. Clark. “I’d sell—well, I
don’t know what I wouldn’t sell if I ’ad the chance!”
“’Ave you tried to buy it off of ’er?” asked Mr. Tridge.
“I haven’t, and I ain’t going to, neither,” said Mr. Dobb. “I’m going to
give old George Pincott a chance to buy it and make a big profit out
of it.”
“But—” expostulated Mr. Lock, at such altruism.
“It looks,” continued Mr. Dobb, imperturbably, “as if it might be one of
them there Old Masters. But it ain’t! Not by no means! I’ve took the
opportunity to examine it pretty thorough, and, though I may not
know much about hart really, I do know enough to know that this
pickcher ain’t worth as much as the frame round it.”
“I see!” declared Mr. Lock, slapping his knee exultantly. “You want
George Pincott to buy it and then get stuck with it?”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t wish ’im anything so unkind as that!” denied Mr.
Dobb, primly. “I want ’im to buy it and go along to sell it to Mr. Lister
at a good profit.”
“You’ll be growing wings and learning the ’arp next!” foretold Mr.
Tridge, in wide-eyed astonishment.
“Yes, and while ’e’s trying to sell it to ’im,” purred Mr. Dobb, “I’m
going to step in and hexpose it as a fraud! And that ought to get old
Lister away from Pincott and back safe to me and my shop for ever
and ever, oughtn’t it?”
“Yes; but how are you going to get Pincott to buy it?” asked Mr. Lock.
“Well, in the first place,” said Mr. Dobb, “don’t forget that Pincott
keeps a pretty close eye on me, and that ’e generally goes by what I
do, seeing I’m quicker at the business than ’e is. And, for another
thing don’t forget that ’e’s a new-comer to these parts, and don’t
know that us four was all shipmates together once.”
“Yes, but how—” began Mr. Lock again.
“Ah, that’s where you chaps comes in,” stated Mr. Dobb, and began
to converse in lowered, more earnest tones with each of his old
companions in turn.
It was on the following evening that the squat and not completely
fashionable figure of Mr. George Pincott entered the billiard-room of
the “Royal William.” The hour was still early, and Mr. Peter Lock, the
marker, was rather forlornly reading a newspaper in a corner.
Considerably did he brighten at the advent of even so
unremunerative a patron as Mr. Pincott, and willingly did he accept
that gentleman’s challenge to play a short game in the interval of
waiting for brisker business.
“I see a friend of yours this afternoon, sir,” observed Mr. Lock,
casually, after a while. “At least, hardly a friend, but more of an
acquaintance.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Pincott, without much interest.
Mr. Lock squinted along his cue, made a shot, and retrieved the red
ball from a pocket.
“Mr. Dobb, of Fore Street,” he said.
“Oh, ’im?” said Mr. Pincott.
“Yessir, Mr. Dobb,” went on Mr. Lock; and was silent till he had
brought another stroke to fruition. “Looking very pleased with
himself, he was, too.”
“Why, was Mr. Lister along with him?” quickly asked Mr. Pincott.
“No, sir, he was alone. He must be finding business very good just
at present. He couldn’t help smiling as he walked along, and he
stopped and chatted to me as affable as affable. He told me I ought
to give up billiard-marking for picture-dealing. He said there was big
money to be made at it by a chap who keeps his eyes open. It
struck me at the time that it was rather a pity in some ways that he
couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Mind you, sir, I think he’d been—”
Mr. Lock made a pantomimic gesture indicating the assuagement of
thirst.
“Ah!” cried Mr. Pincott, with a rising inflexion. “And what else did ’e
say?”
“Well, sir, I don’t know as I ought to repeat it, you being a trade rival
of his, so to speak,” said Mr. Lock, chalking his cue afresh. “But,
after all, he didn’t tell me nothing very definite. It seems—”
He ceased to speak, transferring his entire attention to the
preliminaries of a stroke.
“Well, what did ’e tell you?” demanded Mr. Pincott, when Mr. Lock
stood erect again with a sigh of relief, and then began to stride
purposefully towards the top of the table.
“Who, sir?” asked Mr. Lock, bending for further effort.
“Why, Dobb!”
“Dobb? Oh, yes!” said Mr. Lock. “Ah, I thought there was just the
right exact amount of ‘side’ on that one!”
“About this ’ere Dobb!” Mr. Pincott impatiently reminded him.
“Oh, yes! Well, he didn’t tell me so very much, after all, sir. Only
something about being on the track of a vallyble picture, what was
hanging up practically unbeknown in this very town here, and about
him hoping to buy it cheap before anyone else slipped in and
snapped it up.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Pincott, thoughtfully. “Oh!” he repeated, still
more thoughtfully. “Oh, ’e said that, did ’e? Did ’e tell you where the
picture was?”
“No, sir, he didn’t say no more after that. He just lit a cigar and
walked on.”
For a few seconds Mr. Pincott silently contemplated this goading
mental picture of Mr. Dobb prodigally lighting cigars, plainly an
earnest and foretaste of opulence to come. Then Mr. Pincott turned
again to the marker and urged him to strive to remember every word
that had passed in this interview with Mr. Dobb.
Mr. Lock, obliging, repeated some severe strictures of Mr. Dobb’s
with regard to the district council, the state of the weather, and the
badness of the local railway service. He was unable, however, to
add one iota to that which he had already repeated concerning Mr.
Dobb’s boasted pictorial discovery.
In the circumstances it was not surprising that Mr. Lock won the
game with unusual ease, for Mr. Pincott had become heavily
meditative, and in this mood he continued long after he had left the
billiard-table, and it was still on him in a slightly increased degree
when he came down to breakfast next morning.
It was soon after that meal that the bell affixed to the door of his
shop summoned Mr. Pincott to the counter. Standing near the door,
in an attitude somewhat furtive and hesitant, was a stout and aged
mariner whom Mr. Pincott identified as the propulsive power of the
ferry plying across the harbour mouth.
“Can I—can I speak to you, private and confident, for a minute, sir?”
asked Mr. Clark, hoarsely.
“It depends,” hedged Mr. Pincott.
“It ain’t nothing to do with carumgorums this time, sir,” promised Mr.
Clark.
“If it’s anything the police might want to know about,” said Mr.
Pincott, “you’ve come to the wrong shop. Come at the wrong time o’
day, anyway.”
“Nor it ain’t anything to do with lead piping nor door-knockers, nor
anything like that, sir,” disclaimed Mr. Clark.
“Then what is it?”
Mr. Clark gazed cautiously about him, and then, articulating into the
back of his hand in a conspiratorial way, whispered across the
counter.
“Eh?” asked Mr. Pincott. “I didn’t ’ear? Carrots? This ain’t a
greengrocery!”
“I asked,” said Mr. Clark, more audibly, “’ow much is Carrottis
worth?”
“Carrottis?” echoed Mr. Pincott, puzzled. “What are they, anyway?”
“Pickchers,” explained Mr. Clark. “Sort of these clarrsical pickchers
painted by a chap called Carrotti, ages and ages ago.”
“’Ow the dooce should I know?” irritably began Mr. Pincott; and then
his professional instincts asserted themselves. “They—they might
be worth anything, up or down. It all depends. What makes you
ask?”
“There’s a certain party wants to buy one,” said Mr. Clark. “And ’e’s
made a offer for it, and it’s been refused. And ’e’s asked me to go
along and make a little ’igher offer for it on ’is behalf and yet not on
his behalf, if you takes my meaning. ’E’s frightened that they know
’e’s keen on getting it. And I says to myself that if there’s money to
be made, why shouldn’t I make a bit extra, too? That’s only fair, ain’t
it, sir?”
“Yes, yes,” assented Mr. Pincott. “And who might your friend be?”
“Ah, that ’ud be telling,” said Mr. Clark. “And I promised to keep ’is
name right out of it. But,” he added, leering artfully, “there’s only you
and ’im in the same business in this ’ere town.”
“’Orace Dobb!” cried Mr. Pincott.
“Well, I can take my haffydavit that I never told you ’is name, now,
can’t I?” pointed out Mr. Clark, primly. “Well, be ’e ’oo ’e may, why
should I take the trouble to buy it for ’im for a small tip when some
one else might be willing to give me a bigger one? ’E ain’t got no
particular call on me, and business is business when all’s said and
done, ain’t it, sir?”
“Of course,” assented Mr. Pincott. “Why shouldn’t you be artful as
well as anybody else? Where did you say the pickcher was?”
“I didn’t say,” replied Mr. Clark, gently.
“Well, ’ow can I say whether I want to buy it if I ’aven’t seen it?”
contended Mr. Pincott, frowning.
“Ah, I wasn’t born yestiddy!” declared Mr. Clark, acutely. “If I tells
you where the picture is to be found I might as well be right out of the
affair altogether. You’d go along and buy it on your own, behind my
back.”
“No such thing,” denied Mr. Pincott, with overdone indignation.
“Oh, well, I can proteck my own hinterests, thanks be!” stated Mr.
Clark, easily. “I’ll wait till things is a bit further hadvanced before I
commits myself. I’ll find out what price she’s willing to take, and see
you again before I sees Mr. Dobb. ’Ow will that do?”
“That’s a good idea,” commended Mr. Pincott. “But—but I shouldn’t
waste no time if I was you. I’d go right down there now, wherever it
is, and carry things a step farther without delay.”
“And so I will, this minute,” agreed Mr. Clark. He favoured Mr.
Pincott with a vast wink, and nodded very knowingly at him in token
of mutual understanding. He then took his departure, and Mr.
Pincott, giving him a grudged start of one minute, followed cautiously
after him. The fact that Mr. Clark, without stopping anywhere, made
his way directly back to his employment at the ferry caused Mr.
Pincott to speak of that aged man’s duplicity in the harshest terms.
“Oh, well, anyway, I’m further than I was last night!” was the
consolation Mr. Pincott eventually found for himself. “It’s a Carrotti,
and Dobb’s found it and means to buy it at a bargain, and intends to
sell it to old Lister, no doubt. However, there’s nothing to prevent me
selling it to Lister either, if I can get ’old of it. Carrotti?” he mused.
“First I’ve ever ’eard of ’im, but ’e sounds all right. Anyway, if it’s
good enough for Dobb, it’s good enough for me.”
And with a grin of satisfaction at the prospect of defeating his sole
competitor in the district, Mr. Pincott put on his hat again, and
sauntered along for his customary shave.
He found the Magnolia Toilet Saloon to be void of customers, and at
once sat down in the operating chair. Mr. Tridge, deftly tucking a
towel about his patron’s throat, began to indulge in conversation with
professional fluency.
“And ’ow’s business, sir?” he asked. “Pretty bright, I ’ope? There
seems to be plenty of money knocking about the town for them as
knows where to look for it. I know one gent, a customer of mine,
what reckons to clear easy fifty quid over a little deal ’e’s got in ’and,
and the funny part of it is that ’e ain’t bought what ’e’s after yet. ’E’s
made a offer, but—”
He stopped abruptly and, obtaining Mr. Pincott’s attention in the
mirror, frowned warningly at him as Mr. Dobb entered.
“I understand,” said Mr. Pincott.
Mr. Dobb nodded patronizingly to Mr. Tridge, and accorded a rather
more patronizing nod to Mr. Pincott. He then sat down quietly with a
newspaper to await his turn for Mr. Tridge’s services. This coming at
last, he took his place in the chair with marked alacrity.
“Don’t keep me longer than you can ’elp,” he directed. “I’m a bit later
than I meant to be already. Give me a nice, clean shave, will you?
I’m just on my way to see a lady on business.”
Mr. Pincott, in the act of passing through the doorway, involuntarily
turned round and stared at Mr. Dobb.
When, ten minutes later, Mr. Dobb emerged from Mr. Tridge’s
establishment, lovingly caressing and pinching a velvet chin, he
betrayed not the slightest indication that he was aware that Mr.
Pincott was lurking inconspicuously at an adjacent corner. Mr. Dobb,
as one with a definite purpose, walked sharply up the street, turned
into the neighbouring High Street, and thence crossed the wide
market place diagonally. His itinerary was closely watched and
imitated by Mr. Pincott.
And next Mr. Dobb made his way down the narrow, tumble-down
alley known as Market Lane, still vigilantly attended by his trade
rival. Finally, Mr. Dobb halted at a little sweetstuff shop, and without
looking round, entered at its door. Mr. Pincott, finding convenient
ambush near by, patiently waited for some minutes, and at last saw
Mr. Dobb come again to the threshold of the tiny shop. Here Mr.
Dobb turned round, and seemed to be in earnest discussion with
some one within, eventually going off back along Market Lane with
his hands deep thrust in his pockets and a dissatisfied expression on
his face.
Mr. Pincott elatedly watched Mr. Dobb vanish from sight. Then, with
long, eager strides, he went across the street and entered the little
shop to the symptoms of tempestuous jangling of its door-bell. A
female gazed at him inquiringly from behind the counter, but Mr.
Pincott made no immediate remark to her, for he was engrossed in
staring at a huge and pitchy landscape. Closer examination
revealed the signature of “Andrew Carrotti” flung across a corner in a
crimson scrawl.
“Very old picture, that,” observed the lady behind the counter,
speaking with a kind of heavy and mechanical civility. “Been in our
family for years and years. Not for sale, of course. We only hangs it
up there because there ain’t any other room for it. And what can I
get for you, please, sir?”
“Not for sale, eh?” said Mr. Pincott.
“No, sir,” she replied, definitely. “There’s another gent just been in
and tried ’ard to buy it, but I ’ad to refuse him. Was you thinking of
choc’lates, sir? We’ve got some just fresh in.”
Of certain negotiations which, despite the lady’s unwillingness,
followed so swiftly and with such continuity of impact, it is
superfluous to write. Suffice it to record that Mr. Pincott, fortified and
stimulated by the thought that here was something he was snatching
from the very grasp of Mr. Dobb, was content to believe that the
intrinsic unloveliness of the picture did not matter, and that its value
was not its value as a work of art, but as a piece of property for
which Mr. Lister would pay handsomely.
So at last the lady, conceded her sex’s privilege, changed her mind,
and was at last prevailed upon to part with the picture at a price
which was only satisfactory to Mr. Pincott for the justification it
afforded him to demand profits on the higher scale from Mr. Simon
Lister.
In some excitement and a decrepit cab, Mr. Pincott carted his
purchase direct to that gentleman’s abode in the suburbs of
Shorehaven. Mr. Dobb, who had been doing a little reconnoitring
duty in his turn, saw the vehicle turn into the London road with its
burden, and he followed after it on foot.
Staggering spectacularly beneath his load, Mr. Pincott was ushered
into the presence of Mr. Lister.
“Lawks!” was Mr. Lister’s simple tribute to the dramatic quality of the
occasion. “Whatever ’ave you got there?” he asked, somewhat
unnecessarily. “A picture?”
“Pickcher?” said Mr. Pincott, setting down the landscape flat on the
table, and mopping his forehead. “It’ll be about the finest thing in
your collection. I bought it for you, a rare bargain. ’Alf the dealers in
the kingdom was after it, but I managed to diddle ’em!”
“It—it ain’t very ’andsome,” mildly criticized the worthy amateur.
“’Andsome?” queried Mr. Pincott. “What’s it want to be ’andsome
for? It’s a genuine Old Master! ’Undreds of years old! It’s been in
one family for generations.”
“Ah, that’s the kind of thing I want,” said Mr. Lister. “And ’ow did you
come to ’ear of it?”
“I’ve ’ad my eye on it for months past,” Mr. Pincott told him. “I’ve
been waiting my opportunity. You know ’ow it is in our line. You ’ave
to go slow, otherwise you’re likely to get the price raised.”
“That’s so,” said Lister, with a nod of appreciation for such nice
consideration of his pocket. “And ’oo’s it by?” he queried, examining
the canvas with enhanced interest.
“Andrew Carrotti, the famous Old Master,” returned Mr. Pincott
glibly. “Surely you don’t need me to tell you anything more about
’im?”
“I don’t seem to ’ave ’eard the name before, though,” admitted Mr.
Lister, very honestly.
“Oh, you’ve ’eard of ’im and forgot,” returned Mr. Pincott, easily. “It’ll
look well on that wall there, opposite the window, won’t it? If you’ve
got any pickcher-cord ’andy—”
“’Tain’t every one that’s got a genuine Old Master hanging on their
dining-room wall,” remarked Mr. Lister, with naïve pleasure. “Little
did I ever dream, when I used to be serving out ’alf-pounds of sugar
—”
“Mind you, you’re lucky to get it,” said Mr. Pincott. “If I wasn’t so
himpulsive, I’d ’ave took it up to London and sold it at Christie’s, but
I’m content with a small profit, so long as I can keep your patronage
and—”
“What are you going to ask me for it?” inquired Mr. Lister, with a
belated effort to appear businesslike; and evinced no more objection
than a twinge of surprise when Mr. Pincott nominated a price.
“I’ll write you out a cheque,” promised Mr. Lister, and this agreeable
feat he was in the act of beginning when the advent of Mr. Horace
Dobb was announced.
Mr. Dobb, proclaiming that he had come specially to bring Mr. Lister
a saucer which matched a cup already in his collection, betrayed
considerable surprise at view of the picture.
“Well, now, I do ’ope you ain’t going to start collecting trash like that,
sir?” he observed, reproachfully.
“Trash, Mr. Dobb?” echoed Mr. Lister. “I’m surprised at a man of
your knowledge saying that! Can’t you see that it’s a genuine Old
Master? Trash, hindeed!” he said again, indignantly.
Mr. Dobb bent and scrutinized the landscape closely. Then he shook
his head, and smiled tolerantly.
“Pincott’s got to learn the business, just as I ’ad to,” he said. “That
ain’t a Old Master, sir, and never was!”
“Don’t you take no notice of ’im, sir!” begged Mr. Pincott. “Why, ’e
was after this very pickcher ’imself!”
“Oh, no, not me!” disclaimed Horace. “I only buys and sells genuine
stuff.”
“This is genuine!” insisted Mr. Pincott.
“So’s that ’ere diamond in your necktie,” scoffed Mr. Dobb. “I don’t
think!”
“Why, it’s a Carrotti!” cried Mr. Pincott. “And you know ’ow long ago
’e lived, don’t you?”
“Can’t say I do. I’ve never ’eard of ’im in all my life before this very
minute. When did ’e live?”
“’Undreds of years ago!”
“’Undreds of years ago, eh?” mused Horace, looking again at the
canvas. “Fancy that, now. But the pickcher’s so dirty you can ’ardly
see what it’s meant to be. I’ve got a little bottle of stuff ’ere,” he went
on, producing a small phial full of a liquid, “and if I might clean up just
one corner—”
“Yes, do,” invited Mr. Lister.
Mr. Dobb, moistening his handkerchief with a little of the liquid,
worked industriously at a small region on the canvas.
“Well, well!” he marvelled. “Blest if there ain’t another pickcher
underneath this ’ere one! If the top one is ’undreds of years old, the
bottom one must be thousands! Why, look! ’Ere is a old girl in a
crinoline just come to light, and a little bit of what looks like the
Crystal Palace. Must be a view of the Great Hexibition, or
something!”
“Clean it up a bit more,” said Mr. Lister, in a new, and strange voice.
Nothing loth, Mr. Dobb renewed his energies over a wider extent,
with such success that presently his theory stood substantiated.
“Well, there it is, sir,” said Mr. Dobb, standing back from his
handiwork. “I shouldn’t like to say Pincott deliberately tried to cheat
you, but when a man starts in this line of business and knows
nothing whatever about it—”
Mr. Dobb gave a half-pitying shrug of the shoulders.
Five minutes later a husky, indignant and profane Mr. Pincott had
taken his departure, and the discredited picture had gone with him.
Mr. Lister expressed his gratitude to Mr. Dobb in the warmest terms.
“That’s quite all right, sir,” said Mr. Dobb. “I don’t like to see no one
cheated by chaps like ’im, if I can ’elp it.”
“In future,” promised Mr. Lister, “I shall stick by you and abide by
your decisions alone.”
“I’ll look after you all right, sir,” returned Mr. Dobb.
That same evening, at a convivial little gathering at the “Royal
William,” Mr. Dobb loyally and uncomplainingly paid out two pounds
to each of his former shipmates.
“A little present from Mr. Pincott,” he observed, flippantly.
“All the same, ’Orace,” said Mr. Tridge, thoughtfully, “’ow was you so
cocksure about the pickcher being a wrong ’un? You’d ’ave looked
funny if it ’ad turned out genuine. After all, seeing it’s been ’anging
up all those years in that there little shop, and never left the family—”
“I knew it wasn’t genuine,” stated Mr. Dobb. “I knew jolly well.
Matter of fact, I give that old gal ten bob to ’ang the pickcher up in ’er
shop. Matter of fact, it was my property to start with. See?”
 EPISODE VII
HIDDEN TREASURE

Mr. Horace Dobb, concluding his exposition with an emphatic

prophecy of success, settled himself back in his chair, and smiled
round on his old shipmates with a certain high, patronizing
confidence, as a card-player might triumphantly sit back after
spreading an invincible hand on the table for open inspection.
There followed a short, analytical silence, punctuated towards its
close by crescendo grunts which indicated a widening and warming
comprehension. And next arose an incoherent little duet, made up
of the beginnings of exclamations of admiration from the lips of Mr.
Joseph Tridge and Mr. Peter Lock, while the tribute of the ancient
and corpulent Mr. Samuel Clark took the flattering form of
speechlessness, allied to a slow, marvelling oscillation of the head
and a gaze almost of veneration at Mr. Dobb.
And then Mr. Joseph Tridge, never a man to restrain honest
sentiments, rose from his chair and forcefully pounded Mr. Dobb’s
shoulder in token of esteem for his astuteness, and at the same time
loudly challenged the world to produce Mr. Dobb’s equal either in
artfulness or fertility of invention. And Mr. Peter Lock affectionately
declared that Mr. Dobb, far from being spoiled by life ashore, was
now even a bigger rascal than when he had served as cook to the
“Jane Gladys,” of mixed memories.
These compliments Mr. Dobb equably accepted as his just due,
merely observing that he counted himself fortunate to have the co-
operation of men who had graduated in craft on that ill-reputed
vessel to assist him now in furthering the more ambitious plans for
which his present occupations as second-hand dealer offered such
scope. As sufficient answer to an interpolated suggestion of Mr.
Tridge’s, he reminded them that “Strictly Business” was his motto,
and explained that, therefore, he would produce no bottles nor
tumblers till it was manifest that all present thoroughly understood
their parts in the plan of campaign he had outlined to them.
“Let’s see,” said Mr. Clark. “Peter Lock’s the ’ero, ain’t he?”
“Not the ’ero,” corrected Mr. Dobb. “The rightful heir.”
“I’ve seen ’em at the theatre,” stated Mr. Clark, vaguely. “With their
’air all smarmed down with ile, and being shot at by villains, and
what-not. There’s generally a gal or two in the offing and—”
“Well, anyway,” interrupted Mr. Lock, with some satisfaction, “I’ve got
to be pretty conspicuous. What’s that worth, Horace?”
“Same to you as to the others,” replied Mr. Dobb. “When I’ve taken
one quid, cost price, off the sum received, and another one quid for
profit, and one quid more because it’s my idea, the rest is divided
into five equal shares and we takes each one, and one over for me!”
“Good enough!” accepted Mr. Lock. “All right. I’ll be the unfortunate
young chap what’s lost his great-uncle. What was his name,
Horace?”
“’Ennery Pash,” supplied Mr. Dobb. “You was the happle of his heye,
Peter!”
“Loved me like a father he did,” stated Mr. Lock. “Always together we
was, didn’t you say, Horace?”
“Right up to the day before ’e died so sudden,” instructed Mr. Dobb.
“And then you went away on business, and you never come back till
weeks after the melancholy event,” he ended, with pride of artistry.
“That’s right,” said Mr. Lock. “And what was he like to look at,
Horace?”
“A snuffy, grubby little chap with sandy whiskers and a bald ’ead,”
returned Mr. Dobb.
“He don’t seem exactly the kind of relation to be proud of,”
complained Mr. Lock. “Can’t you do me better than that, Horace?”
“You don’t get misers with top-’ats and white weskits, Peter,” pointed
out Mr. Dobb. “If ’e’d spent all ’is money on clothes, ’e wouldn’t ’ave
’ad any to ’ide in the seat of ’is favourite old arm-chair, would ’e?”
“By the way, ’Orace,” put in Mr. Clark, “where did you get the chair to
start with?”
“Bought it with a odd lot of stuff at a farm sale a few miles away. It
ain’t worth stuffing and re-up’olstering, so I thought I’d try to sell it as
it was, and that’s ’ow I come to ’atch out this idea I’ve been a-telling
you of.”
“Well, you’ve ’it it on just the right chap in Tommy Lane,” approved
Mr. Tridge. “’E drops into my place pretty well every day for a shave,
and I never see such a old idjit for believing what ’e’s told! You ought
to ’ear some of the adventures of seafaring life I’ve told ’im! Why,
they almost make me choke, telling ’em! And yet he’d swallow ’em
down without so much as a cough!”
“’Ere!” exclaimed Mr. Dobb, in some alarm. “’E don’t know you and
me and Peter and Sam Clark was all shipmates together once, does
’e?”
“No, ’e don’t,” said Mr. Tridge, flushing a little.
“’Ow do you know ’e don’t?” demanded Mr. Dobb.
“Because,” said Mr. Tridge, rather reluctantly, “I’ve always give ’im to
understand that afore family misfortunes made me take a ’air-
dresser’s shop I was second in command on a torpeder-boat!”
“And ’e believed that?” cried Mr. Clark.
“’E said that ’e’d guessed it! Said that there was always something
about us naval chaps what couldn’t be disguised, no matter ’ow ’ard
we tried!” related Mr. Tridge, with pride.
“Well, then, we shan’t ’ave no trouble with ’im!” foretold Mr. Lock,
happily. “I don’t know the chap myself; he don’t come to the ‘Royal
William’ billiard-saloon, as I knows of. Have you ever met him,
Sam?”
“’Undreds of times!” asserted Mr. Clark. “I often ferries ’im across
the river.” Mr. Clark paused, and his eyes twinkled joyously. “’E
thinks I used to be a smack-owner!” he crowed.
“Whatever made ’im think that?” asked Mr. Tridge, in surprise.
“I told ’im so!” shamelessly answered Mr. Clark. “A smack-owner!
Me! Only I was unlucky!”
“A bit of make-believe I can understand,” reproved Mr. Tridge, loftily.
“But a pack of downright lies!”
“Well, ’e shouldn’t try to be so clever, then!” said Mr. Clark, with
spirit. “If ’e can slip out the other side without paying my fare, ’e
think’s ’e’s done well, and ’e takes a deal of convincing, too, to get
the money out of ’im in the end.”
“Yes, ’e certainly watches money pretty close,” agreed Mr. Tridge.
“Never yet ’as ’e over-paid me by as much as a ’apenny, and ’e tried
to beat down the price of a shave till ’e see it was no good. Oh, ’e’s
got a eye for the main chance all right!”
“That was the character I got of ’im,” mentioned Mr. Dobb, dryly.
“’Ence this gathering of old friends.”
“Anyway,” summarized Mr. Lock, “this here Mr. Lane sounds just our
mark!”
And with that the confederation went into close committee.
It was during the course of the next afternoon that a rotund little
gentleman, with a countenance remarkable for a guileless
expression and neatly trimmed side-whiskers, sauntered down to the
ferry-boat at the mouth of the harbour.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Lane, sir!” said Mr. Samuel Clark, with
deference. “Going across?”
The little gentleman, affably admitting this to be his intention,
disposed himself neatly in the boat, and Mr. Clark pulled off at his
customary leisurely stroke.
“Beautiful weather!” observed Mr. Lane.
“Just right for heverybody except the doctors, as my old pal, ’Ennery
Pash, used to say,” agreed Mr. Clark, with some emphasis on the
latter portion of his remark.
“Lovely lot of ozone in the air to-day,” mentioned Mr. Lane, sniffing
appreciatively at the odours from the dredger.
“All, if ’e could ’ave got more into ’is system, ’e wouldn’t be where ’e
is to-day,” stated Mr. Clark, regretfully.
“Who wouldn’t?” inquired Mr. Lane.
“My old pal, ’Ennery Pash.”
“And where is ’e now, then?” asked the passenger.
Mr. Clark sorrowfully shook his head and pointed aloft.
“Far as I know,” he explained. And added: “’E was a good
churchman, according to ’is views, anyway.”
Mr. Lane, in response to this sombre intrusion on the brightness of
the day, kept a chastened silence. Mr. Clark, sighing deeply, shook
his head again, and offered a well-known quotation bearing on the
instability of human life.
“P’r’aps you knew old ’Ennery Pash, sir?” he suggested.
“Can’t say I did,” returned Mr. Lane, apologetically.
“Ah, ’e was a quiet old chap. ’E didn’t get about much. There wasn’t
many as met ’im. ’E stopped indoors most of ’is time, only I thought
p’r’aps you might ’ave knowed ’im.”